Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. I'd like to start by thanking you for joining our first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Joining me today are André Farber, our CEO; Miguel Carfoni, our CFO; and Francisco Santos, our Executive in Charge of Midway Finance. We'll start by presenting the main Q1 results, followed by a Q&A session. In order to ask a question, please click on the raise your hand icon to join the queue and wait for your name to be announced, or you can send your question in writing using the Q&A icon. This webcast is being recorded and translated simultaneously. The projected presentation will be in Portuguese, and the English version is available on our IR website. I would also like to remind you that any forward-looking statements regarding business prospects, projections, and the company goals are beliefs and assumptions, and no guarantees of future performance.
I'll now hand the call over to André.
Thank you, Lisa. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you here today to share our first quarter 2025 results. As you can see, we have a new format. This is a new, more dynamic format designed to better showcase the transformations, changes, and evolutions here at Riachuelo. We had a very strong first quarter. In the growth front, we managed to achieve double-digit gross margins with an expansion of over 2 percentage points. This led us to a historic result, the best EBITDA in the last nine years, and we're very proud and confident about everything we're doing here. Now, I'll refer to a slide that we shared in our last presentation, which outlines our transformation process. In May, I'll be celebrating two years with the company.
I joined on May 2, 2023, and in our last call, we shared some of the changes and updates. Today, I want to provide even more details and highlight other initiatives we're working on. I won't be able to cover everything today. I will share more details in future calls, but we want you to get to know Riachuelo's strategy better. When a new CEO takes over and strategy shifts, it often results in organizational restructuring. Here, you can see our organizational structure with 11 reports. The latest change occurred last year with Gabriel's promotion to head the supply chain department. More importantly, to illustrate the scale of our transformation, 7 of the 11 reports have been in their roles for less than 2 years. This represents a massive impact on the company and all our initiatives.
Changes at the top level cascade down and start to affect lower levels. The 60% I mentioned earlier at the direct reports level, we also had significant changes in our end-to-level, the senior management. About 45% of the roughly 100 people reporting to the senior executives are new to Riachuelo. They have been with us for less than two years. This highlights the depth of the transformation underway. Additionally, 15% of these people, of these executives, are in new roles in the company. To give you a better understanding, we are onboarding new team members from other fashion companies and people from other industries, bringing in diverse skills. We are blending this talent, and we believe that this approach will help us innovate, evolve, and transform. For example, we have a new planning and data department. We have heavily invested in digital capabilities.
We have a new executive management team, and beneath this executive team, we've onboarded additional new professionals. For instance, we've hired former consultants with background in engineering. One example is a team member who came from McKinsey. This strategy includes bringing in talent from other industries to improve and innovate. Conversely, I've been emphasizing the importance of improving customer experience and brand perception. We've hired a branding expert with over a decade at Arezzo to elevate Riachuelo's brand to the next level. We've also been focusing heavily on our supply chain and manufacturing operations. A new integrated planning department has been set up. Once again, we've sought expertise from other industries where these practices are more advanced than in our market here in Brazil. We've hired an engineer with training in Brazil and abroad, Poli and MIT, who spent 15 years working at Natura.
Lastly, in technology, another key focus area undergoing major transformation, we have a new data and analytics department with an engineer that graduated at IME and with an MBA from Seattle, and many years of experience at Itaú. I could highlight 45 new positions on this slide, but the key message here is that our transformation is deep, involving external talent that is being brought in, and a new leadership that combines industry experience with fresh perspectives as well. To further illustrate our ongoing transformation, I'd like to give you an example of our manufacturing operations. We've operated our factory for many years now, though some questioned the factory's strategic relevance. After two years, I'm confident that our factory plays a crucial role. Last year, the factory increased production by 40%, and we benefit a lot from our factory.
We have competitive pricing, and our capability to produce basic items in-house is great, and we are also upgrading the factory to be more responsive to fashion trends. I would like to share a video with you so you can see and learn a bit more about our factory. At Riachuelo, innovation and fashion go hand in hand. Straight from our factory, the largest apparel factory in Latin America, with a capacity of over 150,000 pieces per day, we produce up to 40% of everything sold in our stores, with 100% of production dedicated to our brand. In 2024, we delivered 41 million pieces, a 33% increase with a 4 percentage point boost in operational efficiency. Technologies such as digital printing, capable of printing up to 20,000 meters a day, laser and ozone denim laundering, foam dyeing, and 3D modeling are transforming fashion creation with greater sustainability and speed.
With increasingly efficient processes, we optimize inputs, reduce costs, and boost productivity. Thanks to the seamless integration between retail and factory, through the S&OP methodology, we're better positioned than ever to anticipate trends and elevate our customers' experience through our products. Riachuelo is fashion that inspires Brazil, from yarn to store. That's right. We have the largest apparel factory in Latin America. Therefore, we're uniquely positioned to scale, gain efficiency, invest in advanced processes in ways that smaller players simply can't match, and this allows for greater sustainability. Our factory has been a powerhouse for our core basics, delivering unbeatable price and quality thanks to this operational efficiency. We are also preparing the factory to be more responsive to fashion trends, and this is what we see as the next phase of the game, a more responsive, modular phase that puts us closer to what is happening in retail.
With regards to transformation, we talked about the factory and about our team. Something else we've been doing is to invest heavily in our brand. We have the Riachuelo brand. We've been going through a deep process of understanding the attributes of the Riachuelo brand and transforming it, repositioning it to align with future expectations. We also have the POL brand. This was almost dormant in our portfolio. This is a brand that has been around since the 1980s, but we understood through market research that this brand has an equity. It's acknowledged, and we decided to reinvest in the POL brand. We've been doing that since last year. We've been investing and rejuvenating the brand, and now I'd like to share a video that highlights POL's resurgence.
I'm bringing sexy back. Yeah. All the boys don't know how to act. Yeah. I'm thinking special looks behind your back. Yeah. I'm turning around and I'll pick up the slack. Yeah.
Dirty, babe. You see these shackles, baby, I'm your slave. I'll let you with me if I misbehave. It's just that no one makes me feel this way.
Take it to the club.
Let's go heavy, go with it.
Let's go heavy, go with it.
Let's go heavy, go with it.
Let's be happy.
Let's go heavy, go with it.
Let's dance all night.
Let's go heavy, go with it.
Let's work and live.
Let's go heavy, go with it.
Let's look at those hips.
Let's go heavy, go with it.
Let me make you smile.
Let's go heavy, go with it.
[Foreign Language]
I'm wearing our POL Legacy historical polo shirt, the best-selling polo shirt in Brazil. Everyone here is wearing it today, and this shows how much we've been investing in POL. You've seen this year. POL has a great connection with youngsters, and whenever we talk about jeans and denim, we think about POL. We see this powerful result. We're seeing growth in young categories in jeans, and also we've been developing a product as well. We have new jeans teams. There is a lot being done to support us and take us to stronger results. Just like I talked about structure, I could tell you about many other projects that we're working on, but we don't have enough time. We can do that on a future investor's day. Going on to the final part of my presentation, going back to strategy.
Yes, we have a strategy which is very straightforward, but also profound, and we want it to be consistent throughout the year so that we keep on achieving these very solid results. Our first pillar is about experience. Everything we do has to improve consumer experience, either in products, brands, or channel experience. This will help us keep on growing our sales because we are creating more consumer desire, like we just saw in POL. This allows us to rejuvenate the brand with this great investment in products. The second pillar of our strategy is efficiency. This is about doing things better and more aligned. This is about strengthening our factory. We have great opportunity here to work on the different types of audiences in Brazil with store clusterization.
We have the best retail financial company, Midway, with great results, and we see opportunities of doing things differently with new products and innovating at Midway. We also see great opportunities to price better, better pricing management, and this will help us achieve much better results. Last but not least, the third pillar is improving the company's capital structure. We continue deleveraging the company, and we've been thinking about how to manage our assets better. We take ROIC very seriously in all of the projects we consider to make sure that everything that is invested brings in results and returns. You see that return on investment has been improving greatly year- over- year. Now, before I turn the floor over to Miguel, I want to go back to some of the results we mentioned at the beginning. We're very happy with this robust result.
We saw growth in apparel, which is our core category, with same-store sales up nearly 13%, 12.8% to be exact. Growth comes with margin expansion up 2.2 % points to 53.7%. This double-digit growth and healthier margins is what we considered a magic combination, which boosts our company results. Retail EBITDA, historically a pain point with the financial outperforming retail, reached 7% this quarter. Although there is still room for improvement, this is the strongest first-quarter performance in the last nine years, a very strong and historic result. We know that the second quarter is typically stronger than the first quarter due to seasonal events like winter collections and Mother's Day, along with the fourth quarter, which is usually quite strong too. Having an EBITDA of 7% in Q1 is great progress. Now, let's look at Midway, our financial arm.
Midway had another incredible quarter with EBITDA up more than 20% year over year, reaching the mark of BRL 126 million. We have resumed growing our portfolio, which had been more stable recently. We have been improving our credit granting, as we will see shortly, and the numbers are very robust. Even with the growth in our portfolio, our delinquency rates are still well under control and stable. We are seeing some very strong results. Looking at our consolidated results, we achieved a 22% growth, which amounts to BRL 258 million. This is a direct result of the strength in our retail business, along with Midway's continued improvements. Lastly, we are still in the process of improving our capital structure. Debt levels compared to the first quarter of last year were reduced by 36%.
As we mentioned in our last earnings call, our goal is to continue reducing our debt, and we are on the right path. This will allow us to keep on improving our results and generating more profit for the company. To wrap up, I would like to mention that, as you can see, we have had consistent and solid results for several quarters in a row, and we are undergoing a transformation process. We believe that this transformation and improvement in results are far from over. There are many projects and transformations in progress, and I am very confident that we will come back in the coming quarters with even better results. I would like to thank you all again for joining us. I will now turn the floor over to Miguel, who will give you more details on our numbers. Thank you.
Thank you, André.
Okay, I'll start by talking about our retail performance. The first point we want to discuss is retail net revenue. As André mentioned, we're really happy with another quarter of consistent growth. We've seen double-digit growth on top of a solid base. In some of the charts, we've provided breakdowns for a few years, and in some cases, we adjusted for the pandemic to avoid confusion. Here we've broken down the last two quarters of the last two years, and apparel and retail have consistent results. We have grown 13% in same-store sales of apparel and nearly 11% in retail net revenue. This shows the strength of our brand and the consistency of our strategy, as well as the acceptance of our new collections. We're very happy.
Last year, we had an average of about 10% growth in same-store sales, and this year we started strong growing same-store sales in apparel by 13%, which is our key metric. As André mentioned, the strength of the sales growth combined with solid margins is really powerful for our business. Here you can see gross margins for apparel, the lighter line, and for retail. We see significant expansion in both, almost 54% in apparel gross margin and 50.5% in retail gross margin, and significant increase in gross profit. We reached nearly BRL 800 million compared to BRL 670 million in the first quarter of 2024, and this is very relevant and consistent growth. We would like to highlight that this is the highest retail gross margin in the past seven years.
This is also the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year margin expansion in apparel, which shows the strength of our business and the importance of our factory. We have also been accelerating some pricing initiatives using smarter pricing, clustering our assortment by store. We have been doing important work with data intelligence, leveraging our factory, capturing synergies between factory and retail, and this has helped us expand our margins by over 2 percentage points, which is very consistent, and we want to keep seeing this growth going forward. Now let's look at our retail adjusted EBITDA. This is a record, our highest retail EBITDA in the past nine years. We have reached 7% EBITDA margin, which is about over BRL 100 million. We have been talking a lot about strengthening our core business, and this has been a very strong quarter.
Here we provide a historical breakdown that shows the consistency of our top-line growth, margin expansion, good expense control, and the overall strengthening of our retail business. We're delivering great results here. Now let's talk about our financial services. We're very excited about yet another strong quarter of results in terms of portfolio, delinquency, and overall performance. As we mentioned earlier, our portfolio has resumed growth quarter over quarter. We reached just over BRL 5.2 billion in the first quarter of 2025 compared to BRL 5.1 billion in the first quarter of 2024. This is strong growth of our portfolio. In recent quarters, we talked about this very important metric for us, which is how much value we can extract from our customer portfolio. And we're seeing a 12% net revenue from our customer base. This is Q4 is a strong quarter, so this is a natural decline in the portfolio.
We're very excited about the performance of our financial company that shows how well it works in retail, and we see consistent results in portfolio, delinquency, and EBITDA. Now let's talk about the delinquency rates. We see the usual fluctuations in credit lines, including both short-term and long-term loans. The yellow lines on the charts represent the longer-term loans. Our credit engine and management model are working really well. Credit card and personal loans had a positive drop in delinquency, which shows the effectiveness of our credit management and disciplined approach. As is typical in the first quarter, we've seen a slight uptick in short-term delinquency, but this is common as consumers sometimes face more difficulty honoring their commitments at the start of the year. However, we're still seeing numbers that remain very well controlled under our portfolio management for credit cards and personal loans.
Although this level is a bit above last quarters, this is still well within the expected. Now moving to EBITDA from financial services. Once again, we've seen another growth quarter with EBITDA increasing by over 20%, reaching almost BRL 130 million compared to BRL 105 million in the first quarter of 2024 and less than BRL 30 million in the first quarter of 2023. This is a very solid and consistent growth. We've been emphasizing the importance of maintaining a consistently growing portfolio, strengthening our financial services. We want to avoid those boom and bust cycles. This is yet another quarter with great evolution, almost BRL 130 million in EBITDA and 20% growth, highlighting the efficiency of our portfolio management. Now let's talk about consolidated growth. In recent quarters, we gave you some flavor of what we were expecting for 2025, which was stability for our operational leverage.
We want to grow top line and expand margins, and we're positioning our company to do that, changing the structure, investing in marketing, reinforcing the power of our brands and our factory. We can see stability here in the leverage of the company. The first quarter of 2025 had 39.1% of operational leverage, basically the same number that we had in the first quarter of 2024. When we look at the longer term, I mean, if we look back, we see even more relevant gains of operational efficiency here. You can see that operational leverage has been stable. Now let's look at consolidated EBITDA. When we look at all the verticals in the company, we see this record EBITDA. We looked back to our numbers, and we've never found anything similar. It's almost BRL 260 million in consolidated EBITDA, a margin of 11.7%. This is quite significant.
We went from adjusted EBITDA margins of 4.8% in the first quarter of 2024 to almost 12% in the first quarter of 2025, and we are very excited about this. Now, regarding net income, we did report a loss for the quarter, but it is a significant improvement compared to last year. We are focused on repositioning the company to start achieving profits. We talked a lot about that last year. We wanted to be profitable in the first quarter of 2025. We almost got there. We had a loss of BRL 27 million in Q1 2025, but that is still a great improvement in performance because we had nearly BRL 120 million of losses in Q1 2024 and almost BRL 200 million in losses in Q1 2023. We are on a positive track, and we are confident that we will be able to achieve profitability soon.
As for cash generation, Q1 is a quarter of cash consumption, usually. The first quarter of 2024, we were able to capture some working capital lines that we had worked on, but it is usually a quarter of cash consumption. This is not concerning for us. We are always closely monitoring this. The main consumption this quarter came from working capital. We consumed almost BRL 600 million, and this was mainly due to the growth in our company's revenue and growing demands, capital, of course, but also inventories. We have been preparing to start the year, and the winter came earlier, so we are close to 16 days of inventory, which is above last year's level, but we are prepared to face the second quarter, the second most relevant season of the year with Mother's Day behind the holiday season, of course.
Now, with regards to financial leverage, we remain committed to continue deleveraging the company and improving efficiency and the financial expenses lines as well and reducing debt. We had another quarter of reducing our net debt compared to the first quarter of 2024. In the first quarter of 2024, we were at one-time EBITDA, and now we are at 0.8 in the pre-IFRS measurement. And net debt has also been reduced nominally. This shows that we are very consistent. We continue paying out our debts. We had almost 40% net debt reduction compared to the first quarter of 2024. We continue to pay down our higher cost debt, including the debentures. We announced in our last call that we would make an early redemption of about BRL 350 million in debentures this year, and we're carrying out that plan right now.
We want to reduce our debt to free up resources, which will improve our profitability. Lastly, we show you our CapEx investments. As André mentioned, we're focused and diligent about ensuring our investments deliver returns for the company. We also mentioned that we would be resuming certain investments in the company to maintain a significant CAGR above 10% in same stores and net revenue. We've gone back to about 6-6.5%, which is the level we expect for the rest of the year. CapEx over revenue, we got BRL 184 million in Q1 2025 compared to BRL 90 million in Q1 2024. These were the main points I wanted to highlight today. I would like to turn the floor back to Isa to open for questions. Thank you.
Thank you. We can now get started with our Q&A session.
If you want to ask a question, please click on the raise your hand button or send them in writing through the Q&A button. First question is by Calvin with Itaú BBA. Go ahead, Calvin, ask your question.
Hi, good afternoon. I have two questions here on my side. Our data here at Itaú has been showing acceleration in apparel sales in the first quarter. Have you been feeling this acceleration? Another question is, you have been delivering consistent results for some time now, and once again, we saw the resilient same-store sales dynamic with expansion in gross margins. Looking ahead, what are the main levers for short and medium-term growth in the company? Thank you.
Hi, Calvin, this is André speaking. We see that our business is very resilient with continued growth in all of our business levers.
have been working on them in recent quarters, and this has been sustaining our business performance. We are very confident about the quarters and the full-year results, so we are very optimistic. Now, talking about the future, looking ahead, we have been working on these three pillars: experience, efficiency, and return on capital. I would say we are in the midst of this transformation. We are not even halfway yet. We have been capturing very solid results. This is the seventh quarter in a row in which we have achieved growth and margin expansion. In Q1, we had a 2.2% expansion in apparel margins, and in the last two years, 4.5% growth. You might wonder if this is over, but we do not think so. We want to integrate our factory. We want to have better procurement practices, better markdowns, and all of that will help us generate growth and margin expansion.
I think that we're not even halfway through this process. There is still a long way to go. The levers that we've been sustaining right now, if we continue working like this, this will keep on generating better and better results for Riachuelo. That's what we believe in.
Great, thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question is by Danny, an XP analyst. Hi, Danny. Go ahead and ask your question.
Hi everyone, good afternoon. I have two questions on my side. The first is about the pricing pass-through dynamics. We have a tracker with limitations, of course, because of the amounts that we track, but we've seen some more aggressive pass-throughs in some companies, and you are a bit more conservative, so to speak, controlling this pass-through better. What is the acceptance like? In your product, you said you have good acceptance.
My question is, can you tell us a bit more about your rationale for pricing pass-through in the different subcategories? My second question is about operational expenses. You had very strong performance in gross margins, but it was partially offset by investments in marketing and personnel. When will operational leverage impact your revenue there?
Hi, Danny. About pricing dynamics, I believe that we have strengths coming from different directions. The exchange rate is up now, so for imported products, we have some pricing pressure. Yes, we had to pass through prices on the whole portfolio, but mostly on imported products as well. We have an advantage because most of our products are fully national and where we control the whole supply chain. Even with cost pressures, we were able to manage this well.
Last year, we could be saying, well, with the current exchange rate, there will be pressure on margins. I think we were talking about that in November and December last year, but now we have shown efficient supply chain and well-controlled processes. Even in the scenario of cost pressure, we expanded our margins for more than 2 percentage points. Still more about pricing. Brazil is a very complex country with great diversity and also some segmentations. One thing we see is a gap in performance when we look at North and Northeast compared to the South and Southeast. South and Southeast have powerful growth being experienced this year with less inflation effects, unlike the Northeast where consumers are feeling this a bit more.
When we look at the pricing strategy pillars, if we work better on pricing for each one of the segments in a data-driven way to be aligned with consumer desires, we can go further. You wanted us to give you some more color. This would be one of the inputs I could mention. We could also talk about categories and about other surveys. Your survey is quite interesting. We track it, but there are others as well. We can talk about that offline later if you want. Your second question, I forgot. It was about expenses. Oh, yeah. We have to look at the whole picture, not only a snapshot. We had expenses cut during the pandemic, especially in marketing. Now we've been going through this transformation in the company.
We started the presentation today telling you about this transformation, and this changes our structure. We have been able to do that while keeping operational expenses under control. We think that in order to create this virtual cycle, we need to have a more sophisticated structure with new capabilities. We are very concerned about keeping double-digit top line and keeping expanding our margins and having expenses under control, but without any obsession about diluting expenses now. This will come with time, and we are preparing the company for the future, and we want to keep on sustaining our growth levers. When we start giving you further details, you know the slide I showed you with four new people joining the company? We have people who joined the company in the last six to eight months. This has a cost, but this will bring back results.
I'm confident about that, and this will bring us better revenue and margins with expenses well under control. Thank you for your questions.
Thank you for your answers, and congratulations on your results.
Our next question is by Ruben Souto, a Santander analyst. Hi, Ruben. How are you?
I'm fine, thank you. Okay. I would like you to talk a bit more about apparel gross margins. Can we expect the same gain level that we got in Q1 for the rest of the year? You talked about a few factors that bring improvement, but can you talk about your current projects and what projects can help improve gross margins, better use of the factory, or smarter pricing? Can you give us a breakdown of the levers? Now, a question about André's comment on capital structure and ROI acceleration, ROI acceleration. Can you tell us about Midway Mall?
How much value can this unlock? Thank you very much.
Hi, Ruben. Thank you for your questions. I will start by answering your question about margin dynamics. As I said, we are ongoing a transformation process. We have many projects ongoing. We're capturing margin gains, and we believe that this will be maintained and even improved in the future. I do not think this is just a margin expansion hiccup that will be lost in the future. Margin is composed of cost, price, as well as markdowns. We have been working really hard on cost. It all depends on how we set up our factory, but we have been able to evolve a lot successfully, and we are halfway through this process. Price depends on understanding consumer, on data analytics, on how to price, soft and hard skills. We have been working hard to have smarter pricing.
There is another relevant issue here with markdowns because this can also impact our margins significantly. We have been working on good procurement practices, and we want to be more reactive to buy with shorter terms and get discounts for that. We are also working on the mechanical intelligence of the markdown process. This is very similar to the pricing process. This is about data intelligence and the application of more complex mathematical models. When we add up the numbers, we see that we can get this margin expansion that we have achieved in Q1, and we believe this will be maintained. Anyway, I think that we started 2024 with an internal markdown project, just to give you an example, which decreased our markdowns or demarcation from eight weeks to two weeks. Now we are going to keep on working to be more and more agile.
I just wanted to give you some color on what we're doing. My second question was about return on investment in Midway Mall. Since I joined the company, I've been focusing a lot on our core business and disciplined execution with a clear, consistent strategy that we can develop on. We've been doing that for two years now. When we look at this line with the three pillars, we used to have four pillars, but we simplified to a similar strategy with only three pillars to focus on our core business, product efficiency, and return. We're always open to studying how to better use our capital structure and consider potential strategic opportunities. Thank you, André. You're welcome.
Our next question is by Pedro, an analyst at Bradesco. Go ahead, Pedro, ask your question. Thank you.
T hanks for taking my question.
I would like to follow up on Ruben's question because I think that gross margins, considering all the highlights we had, was something that really drew my attention. Maybe we can quantify that among all of the different elements here, André, the margin gap that you have in your own factory as compared to other national suppliers. Do you have a penetration target? How can this delta help at this specific lever so that it can boost margins?
Thank you, Pedro. We work with a sourcing strategy that is based on three pillars: our own factory, national suppliers, and imported suppliers. All three of them are very important. We do not have exclusive supply from our factory. It is actually 40-30-30, 40% from our own factory, 30% national suppliers, and 30% international suppliers.
Our factory gives us scale in our basic products to have competitive products with high quality and sustainability. As I said in the call, we are all wearing a polo shirt that is manufactured in our own factory. This is a very high-quality shirt with fair price. It costs BRL 69.99. This is just a practical example of what we do. When we compare our own factory to national suppliers, we see that we have 6-8% better margins here. This is because we have been capturing this in the last two years. We have been increasing the use of our factory, and we have had 4.5% overall margin expansion, and that is due to better use of the factory, factory expansion, and demarcation. Now, looking at the mix of the factory, we are not planning to grow our factory's mix so much.
This will grow naturally as volume goes up. As we invest more in the factory, I said this earlier, we have a supply department now. We are always looking into this. Our factory and supply team are on a mission in Asia, in China, Bangladesh, visiting the most modern factories in the world. Factory can be one of the elements to improve margin. Once again, pricing is really important and demarcation as well. This is multifactorial, and we are confident that we'll continue presenting margin improvements from now on.
That was all. Yes, thank you very much.
Thank you for your question, Pedro. Our next question is by Renan Sartorio with Safra. Hi, Renan.
Hello. Só queria perguntar mais sobre. Some of my questions have already been answered. I just want to ask you about income tax expenses. I think the level is higher than expected.
Can you give us further details about that and what you expect? Looking ahead.
Hi. Thank you for your question, Renan. I think the first quarter has some typical factors with certain stability. Financial companies are more stable in terms of profitability. There is an imbalance between the financial company and the retail company in Q1. The financial company has a greater impact on layer. Throughout the year, this is diluted, and in Q4, the average aliquot is close to 20-20-something %, much more competitive because then the retail company takes over an important position in terms of layer. There is also another effect. In Q4 last year, we did some provisioning for expenses that would slip for the coming year so that we could pay them out in the same year.
Some marketing campaigns and also intermittent expenses in the distribution center, just because of this natural supplier cut, this is usually only considered in the coming year, influencing layer and profit in the first quarter of the following year. We did a provisioning for that to prevent that from happening. Traditionally, o nosso primeiro trimestre de 24 também foi trimestre pouco desequilibrado em função desses efeitos. The first quarter of 2025 was a bit unbalanced because of those effects as well, but the natural trend is just to have this balance. In Q4, it will get close to 20, 20-something, and for the whole year, it's going to be 30-something on average.
Okay, thank you.
Okay. Now we have some questions that were sent in writing. The first, by Carlos Ereira. He's asking, what are the main challenges and opportunities for the remainder of the year?
Are you planning to sell any of your assets?
We have already answered the second question when Ruben asked it. For the rest of the year, we see the strategy continuing. I started out the day talking about our transformation process, which is still ongoing. We have a very clear strategy and will continue executing with discipline to continue sustaining robust growth and margin expansion with well-controlled investment expenses. This is the magic combo that will boost our EBITDA and, as a result, deleverage the company to get to a positive net cash so that we can be more and more profitable and generate more cash. We have been talking a lot about that today, and I think we will just continue working on these levers because we still have a long way to go. We still have a lot of juice to put into these initiatives.
There are great things ahead of us.
Okay, thank you. The second question is by Gabriel Avila from Condor. He says that there is a 10.7% growth in same-store sales in retail. That was quite positive. What factors sustain this growth? Do you expect these growth rates to be maintained in the medium term?
We are working really hard every day to keep this type of growth. There are many factors that we track, like product inspiration, creating better and better products, executing, purchasing well, pricing well, distributing to our stores at the right amounts to have the products available for consumers. We are working to maintain that. I sincerely think there are many opportunities here. We have different categories: women's, men's, jeans, kids, fitness with our body work brand, beauty, homeware. I have already mentioned seven subcategories here.
In all of those subcategories, we have very robust strategies. We've been investing in team, in development. Women's as one of our main pillars. Last year, we did a partnership with Missing Cloth, this Brazilian brand, which was very successful, and it helped show the quality of Riachuelo and how we can sustain growth. Not all the stores got this collapse, but those that got had huge growth. At the end of the day, we want high-quality products and inspired teams. This whole supply chain, which is what I call our engine or our gear, should be running well for us to sustain this growth. I think that we have great opportunities. I firmly believe in Riachuelo's idea. Industry has been gaining share. This is what I call the democratic fashion industry.
The democratic fashion industry, after it was hardly hit in the last five to seven years because of e-commerce and then the pandemic and then the different marketplaces, our model has high value. We have affordable prices. Consumers come to our stores. They like to try on the items. We have high-quality fashion with affordable prices. Consumers want to buy our model. We have a great opportunity to get the consumer experience, which is down here all the way up here, right, to take it to a whole new level. We want to improve experience. After everything, all the headwinds that we face from different directions, from different places, we believe we have a very sustainable and resilient model.
Thank you, André. This concludes our Q&A session. We would like to thank you all for joining.
I just want to thank you all for joining us in our earnings call. We are very happy with our results, the seventh quarter in a row with growth in results. We had been showing great improvements at Midway, showing that efficient management and responsible management, looking at the financial company independently, was bearing fruit, and it continues to do so. We still have room for growth at Midway. Sometimes we were not able to show the strength of our fashion retail with shy profitability numbers. We think that we are reaching an inflection point in the curve. This quarter, we had the best first quarter in the last nine years. The results show that fashion retail has great potential to generate value and great results.
The combination of these two cores is very powerful and can boost results. We got BRL 258 million of EBITDA and half coming from the retail and the other half from the financial company. I just want to emphasize what I said in my last answer. We have always been very confident. When I joined Riachuelo two years ago, my personal investment thesis was that there was a possibility to improve the fashion offer and create a more democratic fashion industry in Brazil. We thought that consumers could be better served, but there were many headwinds at the time. The scenario was not good, but I joined the company firmly believing that we only had to better understand consumers.
Now we see that, yes, this industry has been growing, and we have been growing as well, but we still have great opportunities ahead of us to offer services, products, and better experiences. Two years later, I can say I'm even more confident than I was two years ago because it's one thing to have an idea, and you don't know whether you'll be able to execute or not and how the market will react. Today, I know that even if we do have some challenges at a macro level, this model has a relevant role for consumers. Riachuelo is a very strong brand, and our platform has competitive advantages because we have an integrated chain. We have our own factory, a very strong financial company.
If we work with creativity as well as responsibility and data, we have everything it takes to continue in this virtuous cycle. Thank you all for your attention, and see you in our next meetings. See you. Have a good afternoon.